On November 14, as part of the inaugural celebration of the Bhagvan Vimalnath Endowed Chair in Jain Studies and South Asian Religions at UC Santa Barbara, we will welcome our new colleague, Anil Mundra, as the inaugural holder of the Endowed Chair. The celebration will...
A common refrain in political rhetoric is the charge that given instances of agonism are defective because they are in some crucial way reactive. However, “reactivity” is polysemous and opaque, despite any seeming transparency implied by the fluency by which it is so often attributed....
In this talk, Nancy Martin will trace the making of the sixteenth-century royal rajput devotee Mirabai into a saint and cultural heroine through the varied portrayals of her across the centuries found in hagiography, rajput historiography, nationalist rhetoric, and oral epic song traditions. She will...
Pakistan is today a Muslim country, and it has been so for nearly a thousand years. But before that, Buddhism thrived in the area known today as Pakistan, especially in the regions of Gandhara, Gilgit, and Baltistan. In this talk, José Cabezón will explore the...
In this talk, Maharshi Vyas will explore the intersection of studies of Adivasis, Indigenous tribal communities in India, and theorizations of the category of bhakti (devotion) in South Asian Studies. Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic research, he will seek to provide hermeneutical space to...
This talk by Christoph Emmrich follows the cascading series of translations into three languages, over a period of half a century, from 1963 to 2016, of the story, told by a leading Burmese poet, historian, and monastic manager, about a feisty Newar Buddhist adolescent girl...
In the middle of Bangalore, India, a small dargah (Sufi tomb shrine) is a space of possibility for multiple marginalized groups, facilitating imagined futures that include Muslims, subaltern Hindus, Dalits, and hijras as full citizens of the Indian polity. At a time when powerful actors...
The epic retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa, composed in ca. 1574 CE by the saintly poet Tulsidas, in the dialect of Hindi known as Avadhi, has long been considered one of the most sacred and beloved texts of the North Indian Hindu tradition. It has also,...
Acoustically important aspects of Hindu worship include chants, bells, conch-shells, and gongs. Every Hindu temple is fitted with bells that worshipers ring. Conch-shells and gongs are used at various times during pūjā rituals, during which texts from the Vedas and other Sanskrit scriptures are chanted....
The Tape Letters project shines light on the practice of recording and sending messages on cassette tape as a mode of communication by Pakistanis who migrated and settled in the UK between 1960 and 1980. Drawing directly both from first-hand interviews and from the informal...
This colloquium will explore with Paramita Vohra the experience of co-creating a digital space about sex, love, and desire in India. Paromita Vohra is an Indian media artist and writer who works with a range of forms, including film, comic books, digital media, installation art, and...
When it came to medicine in medieval India, it was hard to know who to trust. Physicians and philosophers employed in royal courts disputed the competing claims to medical authority, using debates initiated around religious scriptures to assess the authority of canonical Sanskrit medical texts....
The philosophical corpus attributed to the preeminent eighth-century Śvetāmbara scholar-monk Haribhadrasūri presents one of the most sustained, systematic, and multifaceted engagements with religious difference in all of medieval South Asian literature. This talk will examine his various modes of engaging difference and how they fit...
Why are Jains committed to non-violence (ahiṃsā)? Is it out of a compassion for animals? Is it because of the consequences of violent action on the soul? This talk argues that the answer to these questions depends in part on whether one is reading Jain...
This three-day conference and accompanying film series have been organized to celebrate the birth centenary of the renowned Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). Most critical evaluations of Ray, which tend to focus on his films while overlooking his considerable literary and design output, have consecrated...
In this talk, Rory Lindsay will share with us insights from his forthcoming book, Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (2022). He will discuss the history of one of the first Buddhist funerary traditions to be adopted in...
In this talk, Paula Richman will provide a brief survey of the major performance traditions in which the Ramayana narrative is enacted in different regions of India, including Kerala, Tamilnadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Assam. She will then provide analyses of two examples...
The realm of hungry ghosts is one of the unfortunate realms of rebirth in the Buddhist cycle of existence, and those reborn there are said to have led lives consumed by greed and spite. But hungry ghosts know the error of their ways, and they...
The sixteenth-century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition proposes a unique model of grace that decenters the paradigm of atonement and forgiveness and instead centers on forgetting and remembrance. In this Kṛṣṇa bhakti tradition, jīvas, embodied beings, occupy a unique intermediary position that identifies them both in relationship...
Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84686450683 Following widows and their families in the aftermath of a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, this talk centers the lives and aspirations of widows amidst serial war and serial humanitarianism. As white sentimentality structures landscapes of care in Kabul, refusal is what...
Zoom attendance link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87209704725 In this talk, Jonathan Dickstein will discuss anatomical and residential animal taxonomies as represented in canonical Vedic texts of the second and first millennia BCE. The Brāhmaṇas (900-650 BCE) in particular emphasize a residence-based categorization of animals into two main categories: “village...
ATTEND DISCUSSION In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson brings together the freighted categories of “race” and “caste” and argues that, while the two are not synonymous, they “can and do coexi st in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other.” Wilkerson...
ATTEND DISCUSSION Using evidence concerning the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India, Aseema Sinha presents new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for the Hindutva project and proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded...
Keith Cantú’s talk will center on the life and yogic literature of the Tamil yogi Sri Sabhapati Swami (Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, 1828–1923/4). The first part of the talk will consist of an overview of Sabhapati’s life and historical context, including his interactions and falling out with...
ATTEND DISCUSSION Epidemics make us keenly aware of our multispecies distributions: of changes to our microbial makeup, of the mediums (body fluids to the elements) that enable transmission. While our body makes us aware of fevers and aches, we need technical mediation beyond the everyday thermometer...
ATTEND DISCUSSION Continuing a trend set by Bollywood cinema since the mid-2000s, small towns and villages in India are being mined for their performative excess, comic potential, and cultures of violence by platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Mukherjee traced this trend to Jamtara: Sabka...
ATTEND DISCUSSION This seminar session will feature a discussion with Radhika Govindrajan about her book Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (2018), which is an ethnographic study of the interspecies relationships between human and nonhuman animals in the mountain villages of the Central Himalayan...
ATTEND DISCUSSION The meeting will be hosted by our South Asia RFG colleague William Elison, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UCSB, as part of his seminar on Religion and Ideology in Modern India: Current Approaches. This seminar session will feature a discussion with Amanda Lucia...
The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by the Indian Parliament on December 11, 2019. It amends the Citizenship Act of 1955 and creates an easier path for acquiring Indian citizenship for persecuted religious minorities—Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Christian, and Parsi—from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan...
Debates on the “tribal question” constituted an important part of intellectual politics during the late colonial period in South Asia, especially during the decades leading to the Partition and Independence in 1947. Present-day "reservation" (affirmative action) policies for the "Scheduled Tribes" owe much to these...
Traditional discussions of gender in Hindu traditions often begin with a critique of patriarchy in orthodox Brahmanical Dharmaśāstras, followed by a turn to potential feminist resources—for example, in goddess worship, Śākta traditions, and Tantra. One effect of this line of thinking has been a relative...
This South Asia symposium celebrates the life of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition, on the 550th anniversary of his birth. The symposium will feature talks by two UCSB faculty members: Anshu Malhotra, Professor and Kundun Kaur Kapany Chair of Sikh and Punjabi...
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), the German-American philosopher and political theorist who was a prominent member of the Frankfurt School of critical social theory, envisioned a new form of feminist socialism in which Eros, desire, the domain of the body and the passions, would be restored to...
Ethnic voting is a feature of many multiethnic democracies the world over. The existence of an identity group does not guarantee the electoral solidarity of group members. Besides the desire to corner state resources, relations of fear and prejudice between groups are identified as prominent...
Homes for Gods and Mortals is a 2018 documentary by the acclaimed Indian film scholar Gayatri Chatterjee. It follows life in two small settlements neighboring the temple complex of Khajuraho, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Madhya Pradesh, India, that is famous for its ornate...
This presentation will explore what it means for people from Mustang, Nepal, including those who have migrated to New York, to care for each other, steward a homeland across time and space, remake home elsewhere, and confront distinct forms of happiness and suffering through these...
Portraits of Sai Baba of Shirdi (late 1830s–1918) are everywhere to be seen in public space in Mumbai. Are these images sacred? According to the saint himself, historical exponents of his teachings, and many ordinary Mumbai residents, the answer is “Yes.” What does it mean...
This talk will examine the reorganization of singing voices and vocal aesthetics in the music of Tamil cinema, contrasting the ideals for male and female voices from the 1960s and 1970s with new ideals that have emerged since the 1990s in the wake of India’s...
Why are counterinsurgency campaigns able to overpower some insurgencies and not others? Amit Ahuja’s lecture will compare two counterinsurgency campaigns in India with divergent outcomes: the counterinsurgency in the Punjab was able to subdue the insurgency, whereas the counterinsurgency in Kashmir has had limited success....
This talk will follow the route of State Highway 31 through western Madhya Pradesh, central India. The research is part of a larger project looking at the ideas behind the production of infrastructure in South Asia. This journey takes us through landscapes of sex work...
This talk will examine decentralized reforms in the drinking water sector in India and the Philippines from a policy perspective focused on institutional design and implementation at the local level. It has been argued that institutional architecture for decentralized reforms is contested and requires better...
Although an ascetic religion that touts celibacy as the norm (at least for the clergy), Buddhism has a lot to say about sexuality. José Cabezón’s talk will focus on ancient South Asian sources and will present an overview of what classical Buddhist authors have had...
Saymon Zakaria will reflect on the rich array of musical forms and cultural performances that have developed around religious rituals in Bangladesh. He will explore the intersecting networks of religious sentiments evoked by Bangladeshi musical performers from diverse religious communities, including Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and...
A fascination for color in the 1960s led to Bombay cinema’s mobilization of the hinterland as the site for a new future. With the development of Indian highways and an increase in automobility, a new map of India now occupied the cinematic imagination. This talk...
Anya Pokazanyeva Foxen (Philosophy, Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo) May 24, 2017 / 3:00 PM 3041 HSSB In the United States in the 1920s there were two classes of people who could pull off a turban: “Oriental” men and fashionable white women. This fact points to...
Linda Hess (Religious Studies, Stanford University) Monday, April 24, 2017 /4:00 PM 6056 HSSB Kabir, the iconoclastic fifteenth-century poet-saint of North India, composed his poetry orally. His poems, transmitted through song, spread quickly and were soon preserved in manuscripts and other media. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and textual...
Prahlad Singh Tipanya and Ensemble Sunday, April 23, 2017 / 8:00 PM MultiCultural Center Theater The poetry of Kabir, the acclaimed fifteenth-century poet-saint of North India, has had a transformative influence on both Hindu bhakti traditions and the Sikh scriptural tradition enshrined in the Adi Granth....
Keith Cantú (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Madeline Cantú (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) March 3, 2017 / 3:00 PM Music Building, Room 1219 This lecture will center on the Bengali Bāul songs of Lālan Fakir, an acclaimed nineteenth-century Bāul fakir, and will be followed...
Bruce M. Sullivan (Asian Studies and Comparative Study of Religions, Northern Arizona University) May 22, 2016/2:30 PM Mary Craig Auditorium, Santa Barbara Museum of Art Hanumān is an extraordinary, even unique, figure in Hindu religious, literary, and artistic traditions. Famously, he has the appearance, and sometimes the character,...
Harshita Mruthinti Kamath (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Monday, May 11, 2016 /4:00 PM 4041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis in South India, this lecture will center on a hereditary community of brahmin men from the village of Kuchipudi...
Adnan A. Naseemullah (South Asia and International Relations, King's College London) Friday, January 8, 2016 / 12:30 PM Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall This lecture will discuss contemporary industrial development in a new era of drastically constricted state capacity, from the point of view of the manufacturing...
Anrea Acri (Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore) Wednesday, November 18, 2015 / 5:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture will survey the Indic traditions of ṣaḍaṅga-yoga (“six-limbed yoga”) and aṣṭāṅga-yoga (“eight-limbed yoga”) in the Indonesian Archipelago, as illuminated...
Adam Krug (Religious Studies, UCSB) Friday, May 22 / 4:00 PM 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The Seven Texts on Siddhi (ca. ninth to tenth centuries) were influential in both the development of Vajrayāna Buddhism in India and the later emergence of the mahāmudrā meditation traditions of...
Najeeb Jan (Geography, University of Colorado, Boulder) Friday, May 8, 2015 / 12:00 PM 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building On January 4, 2011, Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab, was executed by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri, for the crime of “Blasphemy against Islam.” This lecture...
Jeremy Hanes (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, March 11 / 4:00 PM* 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building *Please note the change in time. The North Indian goddess Śītalā was once associated with smallpox, a disease that is now only present in lab samples, yet she...
Aaron Ullrey (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, March 6 / 3:00 PM 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building During the medieval period Digambara Jains in Karnataka composed and circulated two magic Tantras containing aggressive magic that was in vogue at the time and that challenged...
Brenda Beck (Anthropology, University of Toronto) Wednesday, February 25 / 3:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Over the past decades Brenda Beck has brought a medieval Tamil folk epic, "the Story of Ponnivala", to life through film animation, producing a thirteen-hour series that has been...
Claire Robison (Religious Studies, UCSB) Wednesday, December 10, 2014 / 5:00 pm IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB The Indian International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) is assuming an increasingly central role in India’s Hindu public sphere, wielding vast economic assets, political influence, and, more recently, a posh...
Adam Krug (Religious Studies, UCSB) Wednesday, May 28 / 4:00 PM 3001E HSSB Adam Krug’s lecture will interrogate the category economy, broadly conceived, as a theoretical tool to interpret the abundant textual and archaeological data on the patronage and proliferation of Buddhist monastic institutions in India from the...
William S. Sax (Anthropology, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University) Wednesday, April 23, 2014 / 3:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB William S. ('Bo') Sax studied at Banaras Hindu University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Washington (Seattle), and the University of Chicago, where he...
Deborah Diamond (Curator, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution) Sunday, April 13 / 2:30 pm Mary Craig Auditorium, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State Street) Yoga is a global phenomenon practiced by millions of people seeking spiritual insight and better health. Debra...
Anya Pokazanyeva (Religious Studies, UCSB) Friday, February 21 / 4:00 PM 3041 HSSB It might seem logical to assume that a Yogi, by definition, is one who does yoga. However, as these terms first entered the American imagination they did not always do so in accordance...
Sudhir Mahadevan (Comparative Literature, University of Washington, Seattle) Friday, November 1 / 10:00 AM SSMS 2135 Popular histories of Indian cinema's past expose fundamental aspects of India’s cinematic imaginaries. This presentation surveys some of these histories, juxtaposing the official and corporate narratives with non-official ones. While...
Friday, June 7 / 4:00-6:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Jason Schwartz (Religious Studies) A Wizard in the Chronicles of Amber: Rethinking the Religious Culture of the Rājput Courts in Light of the Kachwaha's Śākta Preceptor This lecture will retrace the path traveled by the prolific Śākta...
Philip Deslippe (Religious Studies, UCSB) Wednesday, May 22 / 3:00 PM 3041 HSSB The recent outpouring of scholarly and popular writing on the history of American yoga has largely glossed over the seven decades between Swami Vivekananda in 1893 and the massive influx of swamis and gurus in...
Shalv Weil (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Wednesday, May 8 / 3:00 PM 3041 HSSB This talk discusses the Hindu temple genre of kirtan as it has been performed in different Jewish topographies by the largest of the three Indian Jewish communities, the Bene Israel of Maharashtra. Nineteenth-century Bene...
Kerry San Chirico (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Monday, June 4 / 7:30 pm 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In the Banaras region of Uttar Pradesh, so-called Hindu “Other Backward Classes” and “Scheduled Castes” can be found worshiping Yesu (Jesus) and venerating the...
Stuart Gray (Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, May 30 / 4:00 pm 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture outlined what Gray terms a historical-comparative approach to political philosophy and applied it to a study of ancient Greek and Indian conceptions of ruling. He...
Vasudha Narayanan (Religion, University of Florida) Monday, April 30 / 4:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building What can we learn about Vaisnava theology when we study the largest "Hindu" temple ever built? Using inscriptions, art, and architecture as sources, this lecture focused on the...
John Stratton Hawley (Religion, Barnard College and Columbia University) Ninian Smart Memorial Lecture Thursday, April 26 / 5:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In this lecture Hawley provided a critical assessment of the “bhakti movement” trope as a bifocal, multilayered notion that draws on...
Shalini Kakar (IHC Research Fellow) Wednesday, March 14 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture explored the devotional fandom centered around images of Bollywood film star Amitabh Bachchan in the Amitabh Bachchan Fan Association (ABFA) in Kolkata, India. Kakar investigated the ways...
Mark McLaughlin (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, January 18 / 4:00 pm 6056 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture focused on the Hindu samadhi shrine, which marks the final resting-place of a realized saint’s body, as an expression of sacred space in South Asia....
John Stratton Hawley (Religion, Barnard College and Columbia University) Wednesday, November 16 / 3:30 pm 1910 Buchanan Hall It is no secret that religion is a very serious thing—de la vie sérieuse, Durkheim says somewhere. Yet in the lives of the bhakti saints, as told in...
Anne Blackburn (South Asian Studies and Buddhist Studies, Cornell University) Friday, October 14 / 5:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building As British and French colonial control deepened in Lanka and Southeast Asia during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Buddhist monks and devotees...
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Van Maximillian Carlson (Director) Monday, May 23 / 7:00 PM Pollock Theater Bhopali (2011) documents the experience of second-generation children in Bhopal, India, who have been affected by the Union Carbide gas disaster of 1984, the worst industrial disaster in history, and subsequent contamination of groundwater by Union...
Shalini Kakar (IHC Research Fellow) Wednesday, May 11 / 12:00 pm McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Film stars are worshiped in India, and even temples are dedicated to them by their devotee-fans. The fan clubs of South Indian film star Rajinikanth publicly...
Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Thursday, April 21 / 4:00 pm 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building This lecture focused on a certain trajectory in recent works by documentary filmmaker Madhusree Dutta: her preoccupation with the triad city-cinema-publics to...
Philip Goldberg (Author) Thursday, March 3 / 6:30 pm 4041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building For over two hundred years India’s philosophies and practices have been transforming the ways in which Americans understand and engage in religious and spiritual practices. This multimedia presentation illuminated this remarkable history and...
Saturday, January 15 / 9:00 am–6:00 pm Loma Pelona Conference Center This day-long workshop brought together scholars from the United States and Asia with leaders of various international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to examine the role of religion in global civil society, with a particular focus on...
Mark Dyczkowski (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Delhi) Wednesday, May 19 / 5:00 pm 2001 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building One of the most notable features of the development of tantric scriptural traditions, especially in the early period of their formation, is the...
Rowena Robinson (Sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) J. E. and Lillian Byrne Tipton Distinguished Visiting Professor in Catholic Studies Tuesday, May 18 / 4:00 pm Alumni Hall, Mosher Alumni House The lecture briefly traced the past of Indian Catholics in order to enable us to...
Saloni Mathur (Art History, University of California, Los Angeles) Wednesday, February 17 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Professor Mathur’s lecture revisited the legacy of Amrita Sher-Gil, the part-Indian/part-Hungarian painter who stands at the cosmopolitan helm of modern Indian art, by focusing on...
Bishnupriya Ghosh (English, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, February 3 / 4:00 PM 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Icons have a glittering life in South Asia, both as enduring images and as fleeting ephemera. We have lengthy and erudite studies of liturgical icons as well as...
David White (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, January 27 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building David White discussed his 2009 book Sinister Yogis, a historical reconstruction of the history of yoga through the lens of its agents, the yogis of...
Mary Hancock (Anthropology and History, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, November 18 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This presentation focused on the history of visual anthropology and its current theoretical and methodological agendas. Particular attention was paid to visual anthropology in/of...
Rohit Singh (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, May 22 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Drawing on historical and popular sources, the lecture examined representations of Buddhist and Islamic traditions in Ladakh. Most sources depict the region as a Buddhist...
Mark McLaughlin (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, May 15 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In Hindu liturgical texts and architectural treatises a temple space is understood as the embodied presence of the deity who is housed within, and the deity is...
Luis Oscar Gómez (Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico) Michaelsen Endowed Visiting Scholar Wednesday, May 6 / 4:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Silence and abstinence appear in the ideals and practices of a wide variety of religious traditions. Following...
Shalini Kakar (History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, February 27 / 4:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture investigated the phenomenon of “devotional fandom” in the Rajinikanth Fan Club (RFC), exploring the ways in which the over 60,000 fan club...
Suman Mukhopadhyay (Director) Friday, December 5 / 7:00 pm 1701 Theater Dance Chaturanga, based on the novel by Rabindranath Tagore, is Suman Mukhopadhyay's second feature film. It is being screened at this year’s Montreal World Film Festival and Sao Paolo International Film Festival. Suman Mukhopadhyay has worked...
Pankaj Rishi Kumar (Director) Monday, November 3 / 7:00 pm 1004 Girvetz Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s film is a journey into the sweet science of boxing as practiced by two Indian women. The film unfolds as they wrestle with their day-to-day existence as boxers and the conflicts...
Michael Radich (Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) Monday, June 9 / 4:00 pm 2252 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture presented a significant revisioning of the history of Buddhist notions of the Buddha’s bodies. Through an examination of evidence from three disparate sources that...
Olle Qvarnström (History of Religions, Lund University, Sweden) Friday, May 23 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture examined constructions of embodiment in Jain traditions. Particular attention was given to the dietary regimens, sexual practices, purity regulations, and psychophysical disciplines through which...
Steven P. Hopkins (Religion, Swarthmore College) Friday, May 2 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture focused on the charged emotional landscapes of divine, human, and animal bodies in Hamsasandesa (“The Goose Messenger”), a fourteenth-century Sanskrit messenger poem (sandesa-kavya) by Vedantadesika (ca. 1268-1369...
Knut A. Jacobsen (History of Religions, University of Bergen, Norway) Wednesday, April 16 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture explored the public display of religious bodies in various types of processions in the contemporary South Asian diaspora, with a particular focus...
June McDaniel (Religious Studies, College of Charleston) Friday, March 7 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building This lecture explored important issues concerning ethnographic fieldwork methods in the study of South Asian religions. Drawing on her fieldwork in West Bengal, McDaniel discussed a range...
Kendall Busse (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, February 20 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture examined the nature of divine embodiment in the Mahabharata through an analysis of the terminology used to portray divine bodies and a comparison...
Amandeep Sandhu (Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, January 30 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Amandeep Sandhu’s lecture presented his research findings on cultural changes among Indian call center workers performing global service work in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. His lecture...
Rajkamal Kahlon (IHC Visiting Artist) Wednesday, May 16 / 4:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Rajkamal Kahlon is a New York-based artist whose work interrogates forms of colonial and racial authority in her dialectical engagement with historical texts. Kahlon’s lecture focused on her current...
Tracy Pintchman (Religious Studies, Loyola University Chicago) Wednesday, May 9 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In recent decades a great deal of attention has been devoted to critiquing nineteenth and early twentieth century Western Indological scholarship and its Orientalist and colonialist discourses...
Suman Mukhopadhyay (Director) Tuesday, April 24 / 6:00 pm 1701 Theater Dance Suman Mukhopadhyay’s debut feature film Herbert is based on Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novel of the same name, which won the highest literary prize in India. The film has received numerous awards, including the Dhaka International...
Judith M. Brown (History, Balliol College, Oxford University) Erasmus Society Lecture Series, Westmont College Thursday, April 12 / 7:00 pm Founders Room, Westmont College, 955 La Paz Road, Santa Barbara The lecture explored the impact of South Asian immigrants, including Muslims, Sikhs, and Muslims, in transforming...
Scott Marcus (Music, University of California, Santa Barbara) Friday, March 9 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Biraha is a folk music genre of the Bhojpuri region of North India situated across eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar. The genre, created in the early...
Inderjit N. Kaur (Sikh Music Heritage Institute, Santa Cruz) Monday, March 5 / 12:30 pm 1414 Bren Hall The lecture addressed two questions: what is Sikh sacred music, and what is Sikh about this music? The answer to both questions derives from the special nature of...
Juan Campo (Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara) Wednesday, February 21 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture focused on Muslim and Hindu interactions in pilgrimages in the South Indian region of Malabar (present-day Kerala) and their connections with the Hajj...
Farina Mir (History, University of Michigan) Wednesday, February 14 / 3:00 pm 3024 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture explored two themes: the relationship between literature and history, and the nature of gender relations in late colonial India. The lecture examined whether our understanding of...
Will Glover (Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan) Wednesday, February 14 / 12:30 pm 1414 Bren Hall The lecture sought to illumine the distinctive nature of Sikh architecture. After surveying the repertoire of forms, colors, and bulding elements that are shared by Sikh buildings, Hindu...
Isabelle Clark-Decès (Anthropology, Princeton University) Friday, May 19 / 3:00 pm 2252 Humanities and Social Sciences Building In this lecture Isabelle Clark-Decès explored new paradigms for the study of South Asian rituals, drawing on her field research on a Tamil ritual that is performed in times...
Moinak Biswas (Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta) Friday, April 28 / 1:00 pm 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building The lecture explored how the rise to stardom of Uttam Kumar (1926-1980)—who is considered the most successful actor in Bengali cinema—coincided with the fashioning of a new...
Linda Hess (Religious Studies, Stanford University) Friday, March 3 / 2:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building After a brief reflection on the bias towards text-based methods in Religious Studies, the lecture addressed the all-pervasive importance of oral transmission, music, and other performance forms in...
Olle Qvarnström (History of Religions, Lund University, Sweden) Tuesday, February 28 / 6:00 pm 2252 Humanities and Social Science Building The lecture examined contending constructions of omniscience in Jain and Purva-Mimamsa philosophical traditions. Olle Qvarnström is Professor of the History of Religions at Lund University, Sweden. One...
Friday, January 27 / 3:00 pm 3041 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Following our successful inaugural conference on South Asian Studies in the United States in the fall, we invited all interested faculty and graduate students to join us for a planning meeting of the South...
Friday, December 2 / 9:00 am to 6:00 pm Multicultural Center Theater This conference served to inaugurate our newly established IHC Research Focus Group in South Asian Religions and Cultures. The conference featured nine eminent scholars from around the country reflecting on significant developments in South...